On leaders with plans and compassion, pandemic peace and privacy, and sentences that keep their shape
August 21, 2020
Dear Eva,
It is week 99! That is wild. I have not yet taken the time to sit down and fully contemplate what it means to have written nearly 100 letters to you, and to have read and pondered 100 letters back from you in return. All I know so far is from my gut—which is telling me loud and clear that this has been a profound experience, teaching me about friendship, identity, life, and what is possible on this medium we so often conceive of narrowly. But I will save any further examination until we hit our milestone next week. (Do we want to use our letters for that commemoration or write something separate? So many possibilities!)
I am heading into the weekend full of gusto, buoyed by the prospect of change in both the personal and public. This week marked the first with the new CEO at our former shared employer. She is full of vigor, and it has become very clear very quickly that the status quo will not last long. Although change always brings discomfort along with it, I am energized by the possibilities it opens. (It occurs to me that although I have been with this employer for nearing a decade(!), there has been so much change within the organization over that span of time that my long tenure in the same position belies the rollercoaster. As someone who tends to seek change and focus on “what is next,” I suppose that likely made it easier for me to stay so long.) Even more importantly, I am inspired by the possibility of political change. We ended up watching a good portion of the Democratic Convention, particularly later in the week, and we were so glad we did. How refreshing to listen to leaders with plans and compassion! Barack Obama’s words in particular will stick with me in the months ahead. I am resolute in my commitment to doing everything I can (which is admittedly not that much) to help Democrats win up and down the ballot. My first order of business, as we discussed earlier this week, is to get signed up to be a poll worker on Election Day. I will show up to the polling place in my murder hornet protection gear if I must!
Thinking back on our letters from last week, I have been trying to suss out the root of what appears to be our shared calm. I wonder if part of the peace stems from the privacy the pandemic imposes. With fewer social obligations, fewer in-person commitments of any kind, we have more autonomy, more freedom. I think sometimes about how every interaction with other humans brings some pressure to conform—whether it is conformity to norms about what is considered professional success, or how we should control our rude bodies. Every interaction brings expectations, and at least some social risks. There is a bit of serenity (at least for me) to having fewer obligations to conform, it feels somewhat freeing somehow, even while I am mostly homebound. It makes me think back to your writing about sitting on the edge of the river after you began your new freelance life. There is a certain kind of liberty that comes with sitting outside of things. This ties to an article I read in the Atlantic recently by Anne Applebaum, History Will Judge the Complicit, about what causes people to eventually dissent from corruption. In it, she wrote about the pleasures of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants. This, too, is true! Just while conformity can bring stress, it can also bring the opposite. We all like to belong. Applebaum links these social motivations to the behavior of what she calls “the collaborators,” people who went along with repressive regimes, even when they were fully aware of the ways in which it violated their deeply-held beliefs. This obviously has resonance in Trump’s America, and she draws those lines very clearly and persuasively. It makes me wonder, perhaps a bit too hopefully, that there may be ways in which the social detachment the pandemic necessitates might create openings for more dissidence. Without the fancy galas filled with powerful people, will a few more folks find their way to separation from Donald Trump and his brethren? A gal can dream!
Again today Bill and I plan to join a friend for a late afternoon bike ride and beer stop to kick off the weekend. It’s become a tradition! I recall our first of these outings was the one that provoked me to mention my vacation hoarding because I think I took the full afternoon off that time. (Now we just go later in the day, after work is finished.) It reminds me that you had mused about unlimited vacation time policies, and whether they lead people to take more time off. Interestingly, the opposite is true! We talked about this in a business school class. Studies show that people tend to take less vacation time when they are granted unlimited time! It seems counterintuitive, but I think it is precisely because of the capitalist framework that the vacation = money model gives people more confidence to use their time. It is similar to the ways in which daycares that charge a per-minute financial penalty for late child-pickup tend to see more parents arriving late to get their kids. Once we know the contours of the bargain, we feel more free to take advantage of it. When things are squishy and uncertain, where we only risk straining relationships with coworkers or childcare providers as the case may be, we are more timid/careful. Sometimes (perhaps often!), transactional models for things are freeing. I find this fascinating.
I hope you have had a nice week. I look forward to finding out what is on your mind in this 99th letter exchange, and to commemorating our 100th next week!
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday August 21 2020
Dear Sarah,
It’s Friday night! I finished a project on a deadline, ate a delicious leftover dinner of lemony shrimp and white bean stew with crispy buttered toast (thanks, New York Times!) and am now drinking a cider and snacking on cheese crackers, a product like Cheez-Its but not quite. I find them to be not quite as burned-tasting as Cheez-Its!
I am mellowing my way into this letter, looking back over my notes on your letter of last week. I chuckled about Simon the no-walks prince, gasped and laughed about the skunk spray on top of all the storm activity. I’m very glad you all made it through safely and without storm damage! I’m thinking these days about friends living outside of Santa Cruz who’ve had to evacuate their house; on a fire map (a tool our world apparently needs) the fire is dangerously close to their home and neighborhood. M thought it was a matter of 500 yards. The static graphic of the fire, the distorted hexagon of red on a pale green map, does little to communicate the horror of flames moving through woods filled with homes and ecosystems, and still the flat geometric illustration made my eyes prickle. While our bodily safety is our first priority and my friends and their kids and pets have evacuated their home, I am feeling sorrow for them and the very real possibility that their home will disappear.
I know just what you mean in terms of asking for advice when you already know what to do; I do the same, seeking affirmation — I don’t want to be wrong on my own, and I am willing to share the glory in being right. It is useful sometimes to make sure I’m not out on a limb with some way I’m thinking about handling a situation, but at other times, perhaps most times — you are exactly right, that we must not wait for permission or advice when we already know what is right.
This week I’ve been bubbling with the pleasure of finally having purchased a nice color printer, something that I’ve been thinking about doing for more than seven years, for some reason — it’s certainly not a pricey enough purchase to have warranted waiting so many years, but there it is! There have been moments off and on when I’ve thought about getting one, and have been deterred by the variety on the market (which one is best? which one is best for my budget? are the inks expensive?). I recently asked a friend about the printer she uses to make art books and she told me and I spent some time thinking about that printer and its nearest relative, its newer and marginally more advanced sibling. Then I bought one! It’s really happening! It has even shipped out to me as of today. In tandem this week I received an email from the Mohawk paper company about small packs of sustainable paper for sale and I am contemplating buying some large sheets (the printer can accommodate 13x19 pages!) of a golden wheat-colored paper on which I’ll print who knows what, booklets and pages and cards and whatever I want. I have been daydreaming about printing and stapling, mixing colored papers together into books and zines, just making some things and looking at them and sending them to friends. My own ephemera machine! I can be a slow mover on projects and I’m glad to finally draw myself one step closer to getting some more projects done. It helps sometimes to think about the disjointed component parts of a project, tackle them each individually, and at some point, voila! A project has come to fruition without my having known at the start what it would be like from beginning to end.
When I am thinking about the letter I’ll write you each week I find myself searching back through our past letters, looking for something I vaguely remember having written about, and sometimes, even though we’ve written lots of letters and letters aren’t even the only thing I ever write — my job is writing! — I am oddly pleased to look back and see that I can string words together into sentences! A low bar! In my notes for this letter I have written I am kidding, and I suppose I am; I think it is that sometimes the thoughts in my head can feel a bit piecy, like bits floating in a soup, beads in a bowl. It’s nice to see our letters and their sentences still strung together sturdily, still there after many weeks have passed, still standing legibly, not having decomposed into cryptic and meaningless word-piles.
I am very intrigued by the fact that you are rarely sitting down to write these days. Maybe I am most intrigued by the fact that you are comfortable with it, you’re not judging yourself. It’ll flow when it flows if it wants to flow! You have been on a writing journey for the last long stretch — pre-pandemic through to recent weeks — and now your brain is taking a breather. Not everything has to happen all the time! I did have to look up the word quiescent, thank you!
On this Friday evening I am ready to go into a quiescent state myself. Happy Friday, my friend, and I’m looking forward to reading your words — but did you manage to write a letter? Will it be the briefest of notes? What will I see when I open the file? I’ll soon find out!
Until then,
Your friend,
Eva